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This week the University of Chicago Press announced the publication of Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses. The book provides a disturbing picture of higher education in the United States. Tracking a sample of over 2,300 students from 2005 to 2009 who attended a representative group of 24 institutions, the authors found that many students make few or no gains in critical thinking, as measured by the Collegiate Learning Assessment (CLA), in the first two years of college.
The authors also found that there are too few academic demands placed on students and correspondingly too little student time spent, or engagement with, academic work. Gaps in achievement across racial lines grow rather than shrink. And that faculty and administrators are not primarily focused issues of undergraduate learning. The list of indicators and trends concerning student experiences and learning outcomes that reflect poorly on higher education is daunting.
To be sure, there are some students who gain a great deal in college and, not surprisingly, their experience is characterized by academically challenging work. Also, to be sure, there are findings in the study that are likely to draw critical attention, e.g. whether, contrary to conventional wisdom, studying alone as opposed to doing group work produces gains in critical thinking. And some will almost certainly raise questions about whether the CLA is a measure that should be given this kind of weight in the discussion, despite its strong correlation with other more standard measures of critical thinking developed by major testing services.
Although these points are all worthy of debate, the basic picture that is being drawn can hardly be denied. I will be very surprised if more than a few people in higher education are very surprised by these findings. The importance and impact of this book lie in documenting what many of us in higher education have sensed and suspected for a long time.
The book is also important in that the authors suggest at several points why higher education is academically adrift, namely "individual and institutional interests and incentives are not closely aligned with a focus on undergraduate academic learning per se." To oversimplify (but not by much), students prioritize obtaining credentials over learning and social life over academics, faculty view scholarship--as opposed to (rigorous) teaching--as a source of rewards and advancement, and institutions have no incentive to compete with regard to learning outcomes as opposed to status and amenities. In one mild but telling phrasing the authors state, "undergraduate learning is rarely adequately prioritized."
Finally, this book is important as a model for what institutions, individually and collectively, need to do. That is, most institutions can or could with some effort gather evidence on student learning and analyze it in connection with survey and background data. Just as the book is holding up a mirror to higher education generally, so too institutions could find out what learning and student experience looks like on their campuses-and respond accordingly.
Academically Adrift thus provides a significant challenge to higher education in the United States. The Alliance has been developed precisely to meet this challenge, to put evidence of undergraduate student learning and the use of evidence to improve it at the top of the higher education agenda. Our efforts are aligned with many others, such as the Association of American Colleges and Universities LEAP project and development of VALUE rubrics, the Voluntary System of Accountability established by the Association of Public and Land Grant Universities and the American Association of State Colleges and Universities, the Council of Independent Colleges consortium on using the CLA, and many others. The aim of the Alliance is to help higher education in the United States make these and other efforts more widespread, coherent, and systematic. Academically Adrift demonstrates that even greater efforts are needed. . . now more than ever.
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